3 Ways to Make Your Story Stand Out

Writing, Writing - Picture Books, Writing - Tools, Tips & Resources 10 comments

by Kirsti Call and Corey Rosen Schwartz

COLD TURKEY flies onto shelves today!!! Celebrate with us, by g-g-gobbling up these tips for making your story stand out.

#1  Do something unique with language. This could be through alliteration, onomatopoeia or something more unusual.  Since our characters in COLD TURKEY are freezing, we have their teeth ch-ch-chatter when they speak. 

#2 Use humor to make young readers l-l-laugh (and their grownups too!) Wordplay, the unexpected, and an occasional butt joke do the trick.  We incorporated all three.

#3 Include a refrain to break up the rhythm. You can either repeat the exact same words, or use a variation for a fun refrain that kids will chime in on. COLD TURKEY’s refrain varies.  

COLD TURKEY

SHIVERING SHEEP

CHILLY CHICKEN

HUDDLING HORSE

QUIVERING COW

POLAR PIG

 Try these strategies on your next story and we c-c-can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Kirsti Call is the author of MOOTILDA’S BAD MOOD (Little Bee) and COW SAYS MEOW (HMH). Kirsti is almost always f-f-freezing and likes to b-b-bundle up in literary scarves and gloves. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and five little turkeys.

Corey Rosen Schwartz is the author of The Three Ninja Pigs and many other rhyming picture books. Corey hates the c-c-cold and spends winters c-c-curled up with a good book. She lives in New Jersey but dreams of one day moving to the Caribbean.

10 comments

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s